Building Cross-Sector Partnerships Can Advance Local Housing Affordability and Accessibility

Across the country, residents are facing an affordability crisis and rising rents, and home prices have exacerbated the postpandemic housing crisis.

In Teton County, Wyoming—which has historically had the highest wealth inequality in the country, the average single-family home price last year pushed past $7 million. These exorbitant home prices are the result of a confluence of factors: the region’s extreme wealth, which makes housing competition fierce; land scarcity, which makes it difficult to increase supply; and state and local tax laws, which limit the available funds for building affordable units.

With already limited land to build on—97 percent of Teton County’s land is federally and state owned or managed—the lack of inventory has caused displacement and extreme commute times for essential workers. Despite efforts to create deed-restricted affordable housing, production is falling behind demand.

As local governments prepare for fiscal hardship, the role of nongovernmental organizations able to supplement social services and assistance has become even more critical in helping residents meet their basic needs. Yet as more organizations step in to fill gaps, the service landscape can become increasingly fragmented, leading to duplication of efforts, unnecessary competition for funding, and greater confusion for residents navigating already complex barriers to affordable housing. The challenges illuminate the need for housing-systems-level change through coordinated cross-sector partnerships (representatives from different fields, types of organizations, and residents of focus). Together, these partnerships can foster greater alignment across efforts and address root causes that prevent residents from securing affordable housing.

The Community Foundation of Jackson Hole (CFJH) launched the Housing Solutions Initiative, to support cross-sector collaboration in response to the reion’s ongoing housing challenges. In early 2025, CFJH convened a cross-sector Housing Collective, made up of private, public, and government representatives, to build shared understanding of the region’s housing challenges and identify collaborative solutions using the Policy and Systems Change Compass framework developed by the Urban Institute. During the nine-month engagement, we identified early lessons for other localities looking to develop a coalition focused on housing access and affordability.

Lessons for other communities

1. Backbone organizations are essential

For cross-sector initiatives, the support of a backbone organization (PDF)—the support infrastructure for a cross-sector partnership group—is critical to sustaining the initiative. There are many different approaches for leveraging backbone structures (PDF). For a housing-focused group, the backbone organization could be the local housing department, a community foundation with an existing housing strategy, a service organization that already coordinates across partners to help people access housing, or even a local developer. No matter who leads the group, we recommend that the backbone organization has dedicated staff, capacity, and resources to stabilize the initiative. They also need to have fostered relationships that can mobilize organizations and individuals to buy into the initiative's goals.

For the Housing Collective, the CFJH serves as the backbone organization through its Housing Solutions Initiative. They have a dedicated staff member who has mobilized resources and relationships to stand up the initiative. As the backbone organization, they manage a steering committee that advises on the process and coordinates across Housing Collective members. Although they serve in this core role, ultimately, they are not the final decisionmakers. This is key to ensuring they can help move the process forward without holding more decisionmaking power than anyone else in the group.

2. Use a framework to align partners on strategic priorities

Strong cross-sector partnerships can illuminate new ideas, build shared knowledge about barriers across different sectors, and align partners on the challenges’ root causes and solutions. To facilitate these conversations and support productive collaboration, the CFJH partnered with Urban to use the Policy and Systems Change Compass framework. During the first phase of work, the Housing Collective participated in steps one through six of the Policy and Systems Change Compass, during which they developed a problem statement that summarized the local housing challenge, identified root causes, drafted system goals, and identified and assessed potential solutions the collective can capably tackle in their next phase of work.

The Housing Collective identified a broad range of root causes inhibiting access to and development of regional affordable housing, which could broadly be categorized into challenges related to increased demand for housing, lack of supply, and barriers related to the local policy and political environment. For example, some of the root causes identified included the narrow income requirements for housing support programs, the lack of centralized data collection to understand housing demand, and the limited participation of those most affected by housing challenges, which leads to underrepresented voices in key policy decisions. From there, the Housing Collective created an ecosystem map to illustrate which stakeholders hold the power to address root causes. For example, improving access to shared housing data would require coordination among local service organizations, housing providers, and other partners to develop more consistent ways of collecting and sharing information about housing needs. With this map as a guide, the group used the compass’s Feasibility and Impact Matrix to prioritize their identified solutions based on which ones were feasible for the Housing Collective to address and likely to lead to the scale and type of impact the group is hoping to have in the community.

3. Build consensus among a range of partners

Cross-sector partnerships benefit the process by bringing a range of experiences and perspectives. But differences in opinion are inevitable in collaborative efforts. When facilitated effectively, consensus building can strengthen partnerships, even when full agreement is not possible. The Housing Collective used the fist to five voting system, an approach that allows for a spectrum of consensus, to navigate decisionmaking. When it came time to decide on a specific item, individuals would be asked to raise anywhere between five fingers to no fingers to signal their agreement or enthusiasm for the item. Five fingers means “I’m in total agreement”, 3 is “I’m okay with it,” and 0 is “no way.” If individuals voted a three or below, that prompted an opportunity to pause and discuss how to get those individuals to a four or above. This approach helped make perspectives visible and informed the group’s ability to make decisions efficiently while acknowledging that consensus does not always require perfect agreement.

Looking forward

The experience in Jackson Hole illustrates how cross-sector collaboration can help communities begin to make progress on complex and systemic housing challenges. By anchoring the work in a backbone organization, using a shared framework to clarify priorities, and creating space for partners to engage in ongoing dialogue, the Housing Collective has begun to lay a foundation for more coordinated action. Housing affordability is a deeply complex issue, and sustaining meaningful collaboration requires continued learning, trust-building, and adaptation among partners. While Jackson Hole’s context is unique, the early lessons emerging from this process may offer helpful insights for other communities exploring how cross-sector collaboration can support more coordinated approaches to housing access and affordability.

Interested in applying the Policy and Systems Change Compass in your community? Contact us to learn more about our training and technical assistance.